Ole Gunnar Solskjær has hit back at José Mourinho’s claim that Manchester United have been lucky with VAR decisions by claiming his Tottenham counterpart and other Premier League managers have an agenda to influence match officials.
United face Chelsea in Sunday’s FA Cup semi-final at Wembley and Frank Lampard, their manager, has also said United have benefited from questionable decisions going their way. In Thursday’s 2-0 win at Crystal Palace Jordan Ayew’s goal was given offside by VAR, while Victor Lindelöf’s penalty-area challenge on Wilfried Zaha was not ruled a spot-kick.
The United manager also contested claims that his players “con” referees by seeking a penalty through simulation. “First of all with the lucky one I’d rather be lucky than good,” Solskjær said. “We’ve earned our right to any decisions this season because it seems like there’s an agenda there to try and influence. I don’t want to go into it too much, but when you’re offside, you’re offside. So we’ve had a few decisions overturned [throughout the season] from being against us to being for us.”
Solskjær was clearly pointing at Mourinho and Lampard when he added: “There’s too many people talking and trying to influence people. I don’t try to influence people at all. You earn your own luck and I can talk about the red cards against Southampton and West Ham we should have had in games where we lost points.”
He added: “We’ve seen the referee reports after and they’ve apologised for making the wrong decisions. VAR is there to help football, to have more correct decisions.”
Against Southampton, Oriol Romeu could have been sent off for a lunge on Mason Greenwood while West Ham’s Mark Noble landed a heavy tackle on Aaron Wan-Bissaka in a 2-0 defeat at the London Stadium in September. Lampard warned his players not to leave “legs dangling” when challenging United players in the area on Sunday. Solskjær objected to his inference that his players would dive to try and claim a penalty.
“I’ll defend my players 100% – they’re not divers, none of them try to con the referee at all. If you’ve got quick feet like Dan James, Anthony Martial, Marcus Rashford, Greenwood, you’ll get tackled inside and outside and some ankles of our players could have been broken. So I just want them to be protected.
“I trust our referees not to be influenced and I also believe that me moaning about the referees will not do us any favours. We just need to keep playing the football that we do and then let the referees do the refereeing.
“I’d rather go and ask in a friendly manner. The game where Noble should have been sent off a yard in front of me at West Ham – when he absolutely clattered Wan-Bissaka. I’ve always believed in allowing them to make the decisions, I’m not going to be able to influence them by crying about it.”Solskjær believes that as United manager he has to win silverware to be considered a success. “You need to win trophies, that’s what we’ve done over the history, that’s our aim,” he said.